Jack writes contemporary fiction! Stop the presses. Yeah, this was really a flash fiction kind of thing that I just did to get myself writing. Don't expect Hemingway. It was also a first-person experiment, because I've never actually written a story in first-person before.
Picture the scene: fifty-or-so sixteen to twenty-year-olds dancing around to music pumped up to the highest degree of noise possible; alcohol freely available everywhere you look – wine bottles, beer cans, vodka, whiskey, shot glasses strewn across the carpets and the outside grass. The same is probably happening across the country: it’s the weekend, and pretty much every teenager parties every weekend (from my experiences). It’s the middle of the 1990s, I’ve got a white wine bottle from some goddamn place in France clutched in my right hand, I’m single, some idiot has let the Spice Girls intrude on the nightly soundtrack, and I’m sitting outside on a brick wall.
The grass is wet. Not like a soaking, flooding kind of wet, but the type that you get when heavy dew forms, and it’s dark, and your trainers don’t look like they’re wet but your socks and hence your feet get freezing cold and it’s piss annoying. The air is cold to, and if it wasn’t for my warm hoody I’d probably be inside like the rest of them. I liked it outside though: you got peace and quiet. You’re probably thinking – why the hell would anyone go to a party if they wanted peace and quiet? I don’t know. It’s stupid, I know that. But for some reason I get hyped up for a party beforehand, thinking of the people I could see; then I get there, and I realise all those people suck, and all I really want it to drink some crappy wine, sit outside and watch the stars twinkle in the dark sky, and then get really lonely, probably quite drunk, and just about manage to walk home and collapse on my bed. For some reason I do this every time there’s a party, and I still come back every time.
A group of people walk behind me, laughing. I turn for a moment, catch their faces, don’t recognise anybody, and turn back.
“Hey – are you Will?” says one of them.
“Yeah,” I reply, and take a swig of the wine bottle. It takes like crap. I feel a slight headache coming on, but I don’t care. I’m wondering who the hell this guy is and how he knows my name, mostly.
“Will Holland?”
“Yeah,” I answer, and turn round, noticing the guy has ginger hair. I can’t remember knowing anybody with ginger hair. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Don’t you recognise me?”
“No.”
“We went to Primary School together, man! We were like best friends for five years or so.”
“James?” I asked, confused, because the James I remember had blonde hair, was small while this guy was tall, and was thin while this guy was much bulkier.
“Yeah!” he said, grinning. His friends had long gone, walking up to the house.
“But … James had blonde hair. And was tiny, and skinny.”
He laughed, then, and grinned even more. I still didn’t remember him. This didn’t seem like the guy I had spent five years chasing around playgrounds, climbing up trees with, kicking a ball on the road and on the field. It couldn’t be the same guy.
“It’s been eight years since then. I changed a lot. You changed a lot too, Will.”
It went quiet. Not a nice quiet. Not one of those nice silences where everybody is smiling and there’s this joint knowledge of satisfaction. It wasn’t one of those times. Instead I just felt strange; I didn’t feel like I’d changed. I still felt like the confused ten-year old kid who thought girls were weird.
“Anyway, I’m gonna go inside and get a drink,” James said, if it even was James. “You coming?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then shook my head and took another swig of the wine. “Nah. I’m alright out here.”
“Okay. I might catch you later,” he said, and walked off toward the house.
I don’t know why I wouldn’t go in with him, drink a beer with him or something, talk about the old times, catch up with him, and learn what he’s doing now. For some reason, I just didn’t really give a fuck what he was like now. He wasn’t my James. He wouldn’t be the same. Whatever happened, there would always be that gap between us, because we wouldn’t be the same people. Nothing was ever the same. That’s what’s wrong with the fucking world. Everything has to change, so everything you love turns into something you don’t love, and the cycle of depression begins.
I lied before. There was another reason I came to these parties. You could spell it with five letters. Two Es, an L, and an A. Otherwise known as Elena. Beautiful, sexy, cool, intelligent. A girl I could never have. Probably mainly because I sat outside on a wall rather than charming her inside. Probably because I spent all the time getting drunk on my own and never saying a word to her, but fuck knows if I know how the charm a girl anyway. I’d talked to her before. We had a few classes together. I guess I was her friend, if you could use the word, but I didn’t really care for friendship because I just wished she could be mine and we could have debates about philosophy long into the morning hours and drink brandy or something fucking cool like that and have a cottage in the country or whatever.
I decided to take a walk. I wasn’t drunk yet, that would come later, and quickly; one moment I’d be moving fine, the next I’d have my face in the middle of a bush or something and wouldn’t be able to string two words together.
There was a small wood down the side of the house. We always had parties at this house. Some rich kid called Alex lived here, and his parents always went away, and it was away from the town, so everybody even if they didn’t know who Alex was, or give a fuck who he was, and that was the majority of people, including me, came to the parties. The wood was part of the reason I liked it too. It covered the whole of the south of the big estate around the house, hundreds of trees. I liked walking through it when it was dark. Most people are scared of dark woods because of shitty horror movies or something like that, but I always found it strangely comforting to walk through a wood where you have no fucking idea where you are and you can only really see yourself. As I was walking down to the wood, I could hear some laughter. It was a girl’s. Probably someone talking on a mobile phone. They always came out here to do that, and I hated it, because I wanted the wood to myself so I could get drunk and not have any people get in the way of my plans. I hated interruptions, or obstacles.
I strode confidently to the edge of the woods, where the trees started, ready for a big conflict by telling the aforementioned laughing girl to piss off and find somewhere else to hold her pointless conversation. I stopped in my tracks when I realised the girl was Elena, wearing a patterned green dress, with some jeans underneath. She looked cool and hot and intelligent without being slutty all at the same time. Most girls should take lessons from her. She saw me and smiled and said bye to whoever was on the phone, flipped her mobile shut and slid it into jean pocket.
“Hey William.”
She always insisted on calling me by my full name. It didn’t really bother me, it just sounded strange when what I mostly got was “Will”, “Willy”, “Billy” or “Bill”. It was kind of a pleasant surprise. It didn’t feel bad anyway. Nothing really felt bad when it came from Elena.
“Hey El.”
“Why do you always call me that? It’s so … unflattering.”
“Sorry.” She was right of course. El did sound crap. “So who were you talking to?”
“My evil mother. The wicked witch. Nazi bitch. I swear, if I saw her walking around doing the Hitler salute and brandishing the swastika, I wouldn’t think nothing of it. It anything, I’d probably be glad, because at least she’d stop being clandestine and release her true passion to the world at last, so everybody could fucking see it.”
I didn’t really have any idea what she was talking about, but it sounded clever. That’s why I loved Elena, anything she said, even if she was talking about your name, it never sounded wrong.
“What’s she said this time?”
“She wants me back by midnight. I think she forgot it was the 1990s, and thinks we’re back to the 1850s or something,” she replied, frowning. “So, what are you doing out here walking badly with a wine bottle in your hand? Are you stalking me again?”
“You wish.” I was trying to sound cool, but it came out weird.
“I promise you, sir, that I do not and never have desired for you to come upon me in a wood. It’s not one of my fantasies.”
“What are your fantasies, then?” I was really trying, you know. Going for the cool guy responses. Thought if I tried to sound clever, she might like me. I didn’t have half the wit to compete with Elena though, queen of words.
“Suffice to say they do not include a certain William Holland coming upon me or a wood. Especially not involving some cheap white wine. Funnily enough, I am not attracted to the smell or taste of some six quid beverage from Tesco,” she said, with that beautiful smile of hers, which just exuded coolness. I loved it. “Anyway, like I asked, what are you doing here?”
“I came down here because it’s quiet.”
“So now you get drunk by yourself?”
“I always get drunk by myself.”
“What a wonderful and exciting life you lead, Mister Holland. If only I could share it with you.”
I couldn’t think of what to say. “Uh … you wish.”
She laughed at that. Her face lit up in the process. There was a bench nearby and we both sat down on it. She folded her arms, leant back and looked up at the night sky.
“You’re a strange boy, you know that, Will?”
It was probably the first time she had ever called me that. But I didn’t realise it until later, much later, when I was lying back and running the night through my mind.
“You’re like the opposite of every boy that I know. You’re overly cynical, you crave to be alone, your lack confidence, even if you try to pretend you have it. It’s sort of … attractive. Not in the kind of oh-Mister-William-Holland I have just met the guy of my dreams, you will make me so happy, let’s plan our future right now, scary girly way. But the kind of meeting each other in the middle of a wood on a Saturday night way.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Kiss me.” She turned to look straight into my eyes, the stunning green ones I had dreamt about looking into.
I was too shocked. “What?”
“Kiss me, William, before I change my mind.”
I didn’t argue a second time. I was too eager at first, almost jumping into her embrace, but she slowed me down, twisting my lips side-to-side gently, with obvious experience, and I felt wrong-footed at first but then just enjoyed the taste of her soft lips that I had fantasised about kissing for so long it felt like this wasn’t Elena at all but just another girl I had met in the wood. I thought about all this when I was kissing her, but most of all I thought about how I must be drunk. Otherwise I would never have even tried to talk back to her, and she would probably have lost interest just like James and walked off. I thought I could recognise when I was drunk but maybe not. We were still kissing.
She eventually pulled away, and pushed back a part of her brown hair that had fallen free. She gave me a quick smile, and then leant back and look at the stars again.
“You’re drunk.”
It wasn’t the kind of thing I was expecting her to say after we’d just kissed. I guess I was wishing for something more like – let’s spend our lives together – but that was probably a little too hopeful.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Touche, Will. You must be drunk because I’ve never heard you more eloquent in the short time I have known you.”
“So …”
“So what, William? We kissed, get over it. Stop stumbling like a sixteen-year-old virgin. I’ll see you later, maybe, but that’s doubtful, and I’d say we’d could do this again but it’s doubtful you’ll ever find me in a wood where I’m feel impulsive again. It was probably that straight Vodka I was having.”
I was lost for any kind of vocabulary. I grasped at something. “Umm … yeah. I guess so.”
“Au revoir, monsieur.” She got up, blew a kiss, and walked off up to the house.
I hardly saw her go. I just remembered the taste of her soft lips and the feel of her face inches away from mine. Maybe some changes were good. Maybe I should try and be more conversational once in a while if stuff like that happened. Fuck. I just kissed Elena in a fucking wood. I took a swig of the wine again, finished it, flung it behind me and heard the smashing of glass, and looked up at the stars just as Elena was moments before. They must have been looking down on me as well.
